On my most recent visit, Shepherd’s inclusive vision of his city translated on the plate as lettuce wraps, girded with ropes of pork shoulder that he had braised in Dr Pepper—the pride of Waco. Seated at the rear of the restaurant, beneath a looming Guastavino arch, and staring at a platter piled with soba noodles, pickled carrots, and romaine sheaves, I recognized the lettuce wraps as a vaguely Vietnamese dish. Biting through the lettuce, I tasted Japan, in the guise of the soba. Then came the backtrack toward Texas by way of roasted pig flesh, the sweet and piquant siren call of the American South.

Somewhere along the way, I ate salmon, cured with a slurry of Tabasco mash and moonshine, capped with a fried duck egg, snatched from a local duck. That was followed by a brace of Buffalo-style Texas quail, served with a corsage of shaved carrots and celery, doused with a blue cheese vinaigrette.

Before the night was over, I cut into a tenderloin of chicken-fried water buffalo, sourced nearby and swaddled in a heart-stopping foie gras gravy. It tasted like a jackknife stunt of a dish, conceived by a drinking man on a bender, executed by a chef who rises to meet his own challenges. At Shepherd’s insistence, I faced down squares of pork belly, too. Impaled with oversize toothpicks cut from sugarcane stalks, they wobbled and teetered in an impenetrably dark and decadent sauce, built on a base of Steen’s cane syrup. One bite, I told myself. Then two. And then that belly was gone.

It was an epic feast. A virtual tour of the South’s new creole city. As the dishes were cleared and the check was readied, I settled on this thought: If, in the fevered mind of Chris Shepherd, Houston looks like a hunk of caramelized pork belly, fixed with a sugarcane stalk handle, set adrift in a puddle of sugary goo, well, that’s a city curious eaters can embrace.